Protests in Belarus Provoke Internet Censorship

Protests have erupted in Belarus in response to immense inflation, political corruption, and media censorship; these protests have largely been organized online and, over the past few weeks, have resulted in increased Internet censorship.

These protests have caught the attention of the Belarussian President Alyaksandr Lukashenko, who publicly denounced the unrest as the work of online agitators and “typical” social network users, whom he described as, “16 or 17 years old, a cigarette dangling from his lips and a girl under his left arm…They are part of our people, though it’s sad that today we have such youth.” Lukashenko also vowed to stamp out unrest online: “We have the opposition in Minsk on social networks. They use the Internet to call for strikes. I will look and watch, and then I will strike hard so that they will not get a chance to defect abroad.”

The government’s response to the unrest has been swift and severe, both online and offline. On July 3 and 4, Vkontakte temporarily shut down a main online opposition group, “Revolution by Social Networks: Movement of the Future”, which had called for protests via the platform. The shutdown came after thousands of Belarussians, some prompted by online calls to action, celebrated their nation’s independence by marching through the streets and clapping their hands in support of opposition movements and the “Revolution.” When the group became accessible on July 4, the number of members had fallen from 215,000 to 11,000. As of July 13, the group at the new address had nearly 26,000 members.

These outages are not unprecedented in Belarus. According to Reporters Without Borders, the government and police of Belarus have a history of using the Internet in attempts to curb unrest in the country. In April, the interior minister and the police department in Minsk created Twitter accounts (@mvd_by) and (@GUVD_Minsk), which they now use to issue warnings to the public regarding public gatherings, curfews, and so on. In early June, the Vkontakte groups “We stand for great Belarus” and “There will be 1,000,000 of us – Lukashenka, leave!” were also suspended.

The government and the state police (KGB) have also used more subversive tactics online. For example, the Twitter account of The Independent’s Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) was cloned while Walker was in Belarus covering the protests. Hackers used the cloned account (@shaunnwalker, now defunct) to broadcast propaganda, spewing false information to readers in Russian. Similarly, Radio Free Europe: Radio Liberty reported that the KGB detained the administrator of Vkontake and coerced him into revealing users’ passwords, which were then used by the police to gather information about the protests and the opposition.

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